“As a relief Radio Officer I kept a book of data on stations I used on various runs. It was more up-to-date and faster to use than looking things up in the ITU publications, which were frequently out of date. These pages would have been from about 1980, when I made my first trip on the SS Austral Envoy WPGK. I worked on ships that had a morse installation until December 1999.” – Eric Weber
1982
Derek Twort operating the “monster” at Wellington Radio Depot in Constable St, Newtown, c1982/83. “The monster was used to check receiver gating sensitivity and transmitter power output of the 80/100/150/400Mhz land mobile channels around Wellington. It used a Collins receiver with an HP digital signal generator as the LO and a wide band power amp. The most boring job on the roster was having to go through each channel. I rebuilt the monster when the depot relocated from Barker St around 1980 and added a few new features to make it user-friendly. It took some arguing to dedicate the HP sig gen to the job. I think by this time we’d also used a 6802 microprocessor kit I’d built to print out the frequency offset tables for the mobile channels.” – Ray Teutenberg
1983
NZ Post Office Radio operator recruitment advertisement, Break-In magazine, September 1983
1986
On 3 April the Government released the Morris-Mason review of the Post Office, which recommended, among other things, that telecommunications be run by a separate state corporation.
On 19 May, Finance Minister Roger Douglas announced that the Post Office would be split into three state-owned enterprises: New Zealand Post, Telecom and Postbank, effective 1 Apr 1987.